Passing on the melting pot : resistance to Americanization in the work of Gertrude Stein, Alice Corbin Henderson and William Carlos Williams

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Abstract

This dissertation examines Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, several works by Alice
Corbin Henderson, and Williams Carlos Williams’s Man Orchid (a collaboration with
Lydia Carlin and Fred Miller) in the context of the rhetoric of the melting pot, the
Immigration Act of 1924, the de facto segregation of the Southwest, eugenics
debates, expatriate sentiment and miscegenation laws. By 1940, Irving Berlin’s “God
Bless America” (1939) and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (1940) play
out competing populist versions of Americanism, each an assertion of the American
nation’s “true” spirit. While each of these U.S. writers works under a passionately
nationalist impetus, it is one that asserts what they think “America” should be as
opposed to what is being imposed under the onus of the U.S. nation-state. At the
same time, they utilize the sentiment attached to what is termed “American” to resist
Americanization. Ultimately, “Passing on the Melting Pot” finds that the varied ways
in which Stein, Henderson, and Williams resist official American narratives are
concomitant with the early twentieth-century U.S. nation’s preoccupations with
passing, interracialism, primitivism, and biological determinism that still persist in
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contemporary American nationality. While this dissertation does not insist upon a
postcolonial praxis throughout, the chapters, contemporary postcolonial criticism
informs this project’s examination of Stein’s, Henderson’s and Williams’s
deployment of racial ventriloquism to explore a particularly American anxiety over
racial difference in variant ways at different sociohistorical moments. The chapters
“‘Niggers and Servant Girls and the Foreign Population Generally,’” “‘The Idea of
the Indian,’” and “‘The Best Spirit of the New World’” traverse the lines between
role-playing, mimicry, and desire in the texts examined, and examine just what
historically is at stake along those lines in terms of subjectivity and nation formation.